Or, What Marketing Could be, Part 2
Recently I broke my unintentional blogging hiatus to write about what marketing could be, and things to think about if your organic search traffic from Google goes down.
I fully intend to return to technical education and blogging, but perhaps the dawn of a new decade is bringing out the introspect and retrospect in me.
Today, let’s continue the conversation about what marketing could be. I’m taking the lens of marketing from an SEO perspective, because it’s most relevant to me. But also because SEO is one of the most challenging marketing disciplines to monetize & scale within the agency and consulting realm.
Have you ever noticed there aren’t really any big, pure-play SEO firms out there? The largest search marketing agencies are just that- search. Paid media spend (thus services) still rules the marketing roost, and probably will for ages to come.
Why aren’t there big, pure-play SEO firms? SEO is tricky to practice, much less manage. Our practices try to reflect our disciplines. Paid media, for its foibles of opaque procurement and pricing, still reflects a largely ordered economy, organized by purchasing power.
SEO, on the other hand, is near-superhuman complexity at global scale- courtesy of Google’s 20+ years of work in computing, information retrieval, and now, artificial intelligence. Something not easily mirrored by ragtag gangs of consultants and agencies.
As a result, the most frequent successful outcomes in SEO are often agency acquisitions or series C/D venture funding rounds for technology platforms.
Outrageously successful outcomes are so rare in SEO, because so few can consistently master all 5 pillars of success at once:
There are 5 key behaviors that consultants and agencies (all disciplines, but most specifically SEO) must master on a consistent basis to achieve, and more importantly, maintain success.
- Depth of product vision
- Can you master SEO strategies and tactics to such a degree as to actually achieve results?
- Client service proficiency
- Can you keep the clients happy and paying?
- Operational efficiency
- Can you scale internally the first two items to a point beyond your own finite time?
- Marketplace momentum
- Can you project externally your abilities to do the first three behaviors?
- Service capability breadth
- Can you, with SEO as a cornerstone offering, expand from it, into other services? (Ex: analytics, conversion optimization, etc.)
I can’t even say I’m doing all five above behaviors consistently, and our current landscape is evidence that few others are doing so either.
Examining, and perhaps quantifying these pillars will be a fun exercise in the coming days.
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